When Kellie Lynn Dean got dressed Tuesday morning for her appearance at the St. Tammany Parish courthouse, she picked out her favorite T-shirt -- yellow, with a picture of three kittens snuggling in a wicker basket. She thought it might help make her case.

Grant Therkildsen, The Times-Picayune'It's just absurd, I'm a huge animal lover,' Kellie Lynn Dean says of the accusation that she tossed a kitten from her car.

Dean, 47, is accused of tossing a gray kitten from the window of her Chevy Blazer as she turned a corner near her Mandeville trailer park at 7:30 on a rainy July morning.

"It's just absurd, I'm a huge animal lover," she said Tuesday afternoon. "It's the worst thing they could say I did."

On July 13, a man driving behind her on Florida Street called police to say he witnessed the Blazer's driver chuck the kitten out of the window.

The kitten was never seen again, alive or dead.

Mandeville police officers stopped Dean a few minutes later as she turned onto East Causeway Approach driving a Blazer that matched the description the man gave them. Dean denied having thrown a kitten.

"I never dreamed that a kitten might have fallen out from under my car," she said.

Police searched the area for the cat, though never found it. The witness, police said, was "adamant" about having seen the animal fly from the car. The cat hit the road, the man told police, and slid several feet before scurrying under his car. He wasn't sure if he ran over the animal.

Dean was booked with aggravated animal cruelty, which applies to a person "who intentionally or with criminal negligence tortures, maims or mutilates any living animal." If convicted, she could be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to one to 10 years at hard labor.

The stoop outside Dean's home is typically stocked with a bowl of cat chow. She's the neighborhood cat lady, her neighbor said. A half dozen strays live under her trailer and wander inside when she props the storm door open for them.

She's named them all: Tigger, Midnight, Fluffy, Precious.

When she got home on bond after three days at the St. Tammany jail, Dean found that a gray kitten named Tigger was missing.

King started her car one rainy morning shortly before Dean's arrest and she heard a strange noise from under her hood. She stopped and found two kittens, fleeing the rain, curled up around the engine. Soon after, a visiting friend had to pry one of the strays from the underside of his car.

They took to beating the hoods of their vehicles to warn the cats -- drawn to their corner of the trailer park by Dean's kibble.

She and Dean figure the cat crawled under the Blazer overnight to get up off the wet ground. Dean left early the next morning and when she turned and accelerated, he got spooked and leapt out from under the car, they suspect.

Dean pleaded not guilty Tuesday, applied for a public defender and was assigned for trial on Oct. 13 before state Judge Allison Penzato.

Seven friends have written letters to the court, detailing Dean's long-standing love for animals. She arranged for the neighborhood strays to be spayed and neutered, one wrote. She volunteers to dog-sit for her friends for free.

She even refused a hurricane evacuation because she didn't want to leave behind her puppies and the strays, said her friend Darla Benfield, adding: "That's just not the kind of person who throws a kitten out the window of a moving car."